Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

in some cases with interdisciplinary innovators. Cleevely emphasises the radical
innovation opportunities that arise from serendipitous meetings between individuals
from very different background disciplines. He displays a great willingness to span
boundaries and to bring people together while explicitly making no claims about his
personal creativity. He maintains that a key skill is the focus on commercial issues
and the ability to see the potential implications of the creative step that is at the heart
of innovation.
Perhaps it is this capacity to discern the value of innovation and to push ideas towards
commercial reality that is the mark of an entrepreneur. And the most successful (and
visible) entrepreneurs are those able to do this with radical innovation. The different
characterisations of interdisciplinary innovators that we describe – leaders, mavericks,
brokers and boundary spanners – are clearly related to conventional notions of
entrepreneurship, but it is useful to distinguish and describe independently, in order to
account for the ways in which radical innovation might not easily fit within expected
and accepted entrepreneurial practices. The combination of radical innovation with
entrepreneurial skill is potentially highly valuable (although subject to serendipitous
opportunity). One important consideration for that combination would be the ways in
which innovators working outside a structural context must eventually locate their
work within an ecosystem of reputation (term from Lessig’s Remix 2008)
6.4. Education for interdisciplinarity
We saw two general perspectives on interdisciplinary education: professional
preparation, and training of innovative researchers. In the case of professional
education, innovation is not the first priority, as opposed to the simple ability to work
productively in a team while addressing public/user needs. The demand for different
disciplinary components to the syllabus often arises, in technical disciplines, because
the technical content of the professional course does not take those needs into
account. An example from our expert witnesses is the need for large-scale sustainable
developments to take into account political, ethical and community planning issues.
The engineers who work on such projects need skills in negotiation and public
engagement that are outside the traditional engineering syllabus. This may result in
innovation within the syllabus, but it tends to follow professional practice rather than
leading it.
Training of researchers, as carried out in a specialist doctoral training centre focused
on Molecular Organisation and Assembly in Cells 41 , is intended to provide a body of
recruits for a new interdisciplinary field. This might be seen as compensation for loss
of dynamism within established disciplines, giving PhD students the opportunity to
move into a new silo where the boundaries are less well explored. Such centres are
generally established in response to perceived gaps in the coverage of existing
disciplines, or developing trends for new priorities. They rely on broad support in
41 Expert witness report
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 68